On Nov 9, 2007 11:30 AM, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at gmail.com> wrote:
> More generally, this is due to the fact that floating-point numbers can only
> have finite precision
This popped up on reddit recently:
http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/transcendental_meditation .
Interestingly, AMD did apparently figure out how to reduce modulo 2*pi
much more accurately but doing the right thing broke too many
applications. So it's not quite as simple as "floating-point numbers
can only have finite precision", the errors are worse than they need
to be. (But I haven't read the K5 paper and so this information is all
second hand.)
--
Dan